Half-Life 2: Episode Two delayed to end 2007, now comes with ugly boxart

Half-Life 2 boxartsEA and Valve, the award-winning studio behind the blockbuster franchises Half-Life and Counter-Strike, today announced the naming and product configurations The Black Box and The Orange Box, two of the most anticipated action game offerings shipping worldwide this Winter 2007.

The Black Box will ship for the PC, and includes Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Portal and Team Fortress 2. The Orange Box will ship for the PC, PS3 & Xbox 360, and includes all the content of The Black Box, plus the original Half-Life 2 and Half-Life 2: Episode One.

Games included in The Black & Orange Box are:

The final boxart of the Half-Life 2 Orange Box for Xbox 360 looks like this* Half-Life 2: Episode Two — the second installment in Valve’s episodic trilogy advances the award-winning story, leading the player to new locations outside of City 17.
* Portal — a pioneering type of single player action game that rewrites the rules for how players approach and manipulate their environment – much like how Half-Life 2’s Gravity Gun reinvented the way gamers interact with objects in the game.
* Team Fortress 2 — an all-new version of the legendary title that spawned team based multiplayer action games. The game’s daring new art style features the most advanced graphics of any Source-based game released to date.

Half-Life 2 and its expansions are amazing games, so they will sell well regardless of how their boxes look. But this bland yet bright orange boxart seems more like a marketing trick to get people to notice it in stores, because everyone who likes the games will be buying them anyway. This is only the European boxart, so there’s hope for the rest of the world to get some artwork on theirs. — Via EA UK & GTR.